Zillow has earned plenty of critics in the residential real estate industry for its efforts to put a value estimate on every home and provide easy access to information once exclusive to real estate agents.

Spencer RascoffBloomberg

"I'm used to trying to convince people we're friend, not foe," said Spencer Rascoff, the real estate website's CEO, at an event hosted by the Portland Business Journal on Thursday.

So maybe it's surprising, then, that commercial brokers keep begging him to disrupt their industry, as one did during the Q&A portion of Thursday's event. Rascoff says he's been asked by "dozens" of commercial brokers at similar speaking engagements, as well as by the leaders of some of the nation's largest commercial brokerages.

The difference is that commercial brokers depend on LoopNet to market their listings online. LoopNet was acquired in 2012 by CoStar Group, on which commercial brokers rely for data.

Residential real estate agents, on the other hand, have tended to rely on local cooperatives called multiple listing services, where members control the listings and the data. In other words, residential brokers only have control to lose, while commercial brokers only have it to gain.

So will Rascoff's company swoop in with a service for commercial brokers? Maybe, or maybe not. He notes that CoStar is gunning for Zillow's market with its recently announced acquisition of rental listings site Apartments.com.